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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28698549">The Red</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedQueenSang/pseuds/RedQueenSang'>RedQueenSang</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Dreamworlds [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Arrow (TV 2012), Supergirl (TV 2015)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Episode Related, F/M, Gen, Red Kryptonite, Red Kryptonite Kara Danvers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:33:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,384</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28698549</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedQueenSang/pseuds/RedQueenSang</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver Queen thought his strange dream about being an alien was just going to be a one-off from too much Big Belly Burger, but instead he began dreaming of the life his fiancée from that dream had talked about. </p><p>It isn't real, but he hates to feel powerless, especially when Kara begins to act out of character and people take too long to notice.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kara Danvers/Oliver Queen, Oliver Queen/Kara Zor-El</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Dreamworlds [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1744891</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Red</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'm not entirely happy with this chapter, and it feels too expositiony, but I promise we will be back to regular story format with the next part of this series: Wildest Dreams, which is set during Invasion! For now, please give this experimental piece a chance.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>After the strange dream that he had where he was an alien soldier on another planet, Oliver expected his dreams to go back to normal. He had attributed it to something he ate, maybe a bit too much Big Belly Burger. He expected to dream again of his time away from Starling, of the salt cracking his skin on the raft, of gnawing hunger, the abject fear of China, or the grim purpose in Russia. He did not look <em> forward </em> to such a return, but he expected it. </p><p>It didn’t happen. </p><p>Instead, he dreamed of the woman from his dream, Kara Zor-El. They weren’t salacious dreams. Many weren’t even exciting. He dreamed her childhood, growing up on Krypton, and then the confusion and fear as everything began to change. He dreamed the fear when she was pulled from her bed in the middle of the night, a child, and put in a pod, told to care for Kal-El. He felt the devastation of Krypton’s destruction and the yawning void of the Phantom Zone before she slept. </p><p>Like him, she had been stranded, far from everything, but she had no hope of returning home. Home was gone, and Oli-Var inside of him, mourned.</p><p>Another night, he dreamed of her landing, only to find out that Kal-El was grown. She had been stuck in the Phantom Zone for so long that he had become a hero, but at the same time, he barely spoke Kryptonian, and did so with an <em> awful </em>accent. It was strange, but Oliver was fairly certain he could speak better Kryptonian than Kal-El. </p><p>...If Kryptonian was an actual language, that is. </p><p>Over the next few nights, Oliver decided he hated Kal-El. Kal-El had immediately placed Kara with vague “work friends” who helped him understand her powers, as if <em> he </em> wasn’t her family. Kara had been willing as a thirteen-year-old to raise an <em> infant </em>, and Kal-El punted her to some scientists like she was nothing and no-one. He was the only other Kryptonian on this planet, and he didn’t even spend a weekend with her. </p><p>Kara loved Kal-El. She didn’t see what he had done, even when she cried in her pillow about missed phone calls, or panicked in the night over flashbacks. Oliver saw, and Oliver, still haunted by the Gambit, understood. </p><p>He watched as the Danvers forced her to play dumb, pushed her to be normal, reminded her to hide who she was, and Oliver saw a little more of that spark die with every dream and hated it. “Clark,” who was more human than Kryptonian except for when it suited him, called less and less, but Kara still idolized him as she cried in her pillows about her cousin missing yet another call. </p><p>Alex, at least eventually, started to look out for Kara, so she had <em> someone. </em> The part of him that was Oli-Var still wanted to fix things, but could only watch. It was frustrating, but it gave him a break from dealing with HIVE, if nothing else. </p><p>But he still wanted to shake Kara when she went to Boothman for journalism in an attempt to make Clark proud. He wanted to tell her that she could do so much more, that she didn’t have to be like Clark, and that if his love, attention, and pride were dependent on her career, then blood or not, he wasn’t family. </p><p>She became Supergirl, and he felt pride and purpose in her when she decided what and who she really was, but he hated that so much of her identity was based on Kal-El’s actions. Oli-Var had liked Kal-El in the first dream, the gawky, awkward kid who had once thrown him for a loop with a hug, but Clark was very different from that Kal-El and Oliver didn’t have to <em> like </em> him.</p><p>Of course, it was all academic because it was all dreams and none of it was <em>real</em>. Even if Oliver wanted to turn on General Astra and demand to know what she was doing, how she could fight Kara, it wasn’t <em>real</em>. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to fight with Kara, or hold her when she refused to cry and pushed everything down. </p><p>It was strange. He lived his life as Oliver Queen in the light of day, in the grim of the night, he was the Green Arrow, and then in his sleep it was as if he was Oli-Var again, watching Kara live her life and be a hero, and she <em> was </em> a hero, where he was only a vigilante.</p><p>It had been exceedingly hard to watch the Black Mercy, to see the first dream from her perspective, but after was worse. He found himself mourning Astra too. She smiled at everyone, she acted the same, but that’s what it was, acting. He saw her turn to art, and it was strange to see her paint his face and push away James Olsen. She was good, far better than he would be, but it made something in him ache, especially after Felicity ended their relationship. He needed something good in his life, but he didn’t deserve it. Alex had tried to tell her that she shouldn’t push others away for him, well, for Oli-Var, but Kara just smiled and said she needed someone who was hers and not Lucy Lane’s, but that she and James were friends.</p><hr/><p>Then came the red kryptonite, not that he knew what it was, at first.</p><p>At first, he liked the confidence she seemed to have, the way she stopped purposefully wearing clothes to be more ‘mild-mannered,’ to be unremarkable. She hid herself away that way, and while he understood why -- she never wore a mask -- he didn’t like it.</p><p>But something was off. </p><p>The way she talked to Hank, the attitude that went past confidence into callousness, he knew it was wrong. Kara felt those things, of course, but she hid them. She pushed it down. He knew, because he had felt with her through a highlight reel of her life up to this point.</p><p>The way she fought the K’hund was wrong. The way she had just let him <em> go </em> was wrong. It was as if all the resentment and anger she had buried for years was coming to the fore, and all he wanted to do was drag her to the Klurkor studio and train until it was gone.</p><p>All anyone seemed to want to do was <em> talk. </em> Talking did help slightly, and she called <em> Hank </em> out, talked about how it was dangerous for her too -- she wasn’t wrong, but this wasn’t how Kara talked. It was like an explosion of feelings. </p><p>He, unlike anyone else, saw the red behind the glow in her skin and knew. Something was forcing her to feel everything, refusing to let her hide, and as someone who never dealt with her anger, it was bad. There was so much that had been repressed… she needed an outlet. Someone, after they got the red from under her skin would have to give her one. They would have to see, to understand, wouldn’t they?</p><p>Apparently not, and all he could do was watch as she self-destructed.</p><p>He could do nothing but watch as she tried to flirt in a club while Winn and James looked on, not understanding. He had to watch her drop her boss from on the top of a tower and declare that power was deciding who would live and die. He had to watch her fight her own allies, her friends, her sister, before they fixed it -- but that wasn’t the worst part, for all that he hated being powerless. He hated understanding that anger, that clawing darkness, and what it could do, but he couldn’t help. No one else in her life seemed to understand it.</p><p>Because it wasn’t real. It was just a dream.</p><p>But what was the worst was watching her cry. She was shattered by the lack of control, by the way she had hurt people, by what she could have done, and all he wanted to do was wrap her up in his arms and shield her from the glares and stares of everyone.</p><p>But all he could do was watch, and that felt like a failure too, just like he had failed Felicity. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Song for this one shot is The Red by Chevelle.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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